I heard that Gerry Weinberg has an exercise called “Mary hada little lamb,” in which you analyze each word in the sentence to elicit implicit meaning that might be important. This sounded interesting enough to try, so when the opportunity came to propose a topic at Test Retreat 2013 I went for it. My topic “Is testing for me?” didn’t end up formally scheduled but made a nice interstitial topic to discuss with those milling about in the main room.

I chopped the sentence into separate words and wrote them top-to-bottom on a large sticky note. Then, instead of giving some sort of prepared remarks, I elicited brainstorming from the gathered participants. Having received interesting feedback on my professional and personal strengths at Agile2013 that had left me questioning how best to use my evil powers for good, I wanted to hear how others were thinking about the testing field and how it fit them.

The resulting scrawled notes ended up a mindmap, the path of least resistance for me. I won’t say the discussion solved all my problems, but it did give me some direction for future exploration – exploration that might also be helpful to a newbie wondering whether to pursue a career in testing.

I started composing a list of things I’d recommend to people just starting out as testers to help them to evaluate whether to continue. I wanted to encourage them to jump right in but also think big, not waiting them to wait 5 years to reach out to the wider world of testing (like I did).

Here’s my current list. I blogged about various experiments I tried, so you can read for yourself to see what it’s like to select what’s a good starting point for you.

No matter how many times I think I’ve found all the meaning in my testing career, suddenly I realize there are more layers… but like a parfait, not an onion.

Donkey: Oh, you both have LAYERS. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions. What about cake? Everybody loves cake!
Shrek: I don’t care what everyone else likes! Ogres are not like cakes.
Donkey: You know what ELSE everybody likes? Parfaits! Have you ever met a person, you say, “Let’s get some parfait,” they say, “Hell no, I don’t like no parfait”? Parfaits are delicious!
Shrek: NO! You dense, irritating, miniature beast of burden! Ogres are like onions! End of story! Bye-bye! See ya later.
Donkey: Parfait’s gotta be the most delicious thing on the whole damn planet! – Shrek

Learned

Having pricing/rental agreements in writing is essential – but at least one of us was overcharged and our deposit wasn’t fully refunded

Foodie friends should always pick the restaurant

Crafting doesn’t come as naturally to everyone – but collaborative art is more fun!

Twilight is hilarious when read aloud with expression and voice acting

About 1 in 10 photographs come out the way I’d expect

Vintage gold lamé will cover you in glitter

I can disassemble a grill to light it when the starter is broken – but I didn’t expect a fireball when I opened the lid!

Lacked

Roadside attractions

Strange food venues

Pest control (huge roaches landing in my hair? unacceptable!)

Respect from the rental agent who told me I was a b*tch on the phone (keepin’ it classy!)

Support from the rental agent to operate the hot tub that we were forbidden to adjust when it was tepid

Longed For

Working internet connection (seriously, who cuts a bunch of geek girls off?)

Privacy: long term renter walked his dog through our space each day

Functional bathrooms: inconsistent water pressure, toilets constantly running or clogged and leaking, shower door jammed, scalding hot water hurt a couple of us, and what’s with the toilet installed in the linen closet?!?

Stable floors: I fell through the deck once and nearly fell through another part of the deck a second time, squishy kitchen floor

So how did our product turn out? Our execution wasn’t flawless, but we have very fond memories of creativity, conversation, and survival. Nothing like a few disasters to remind us how fortunate we are.

When I was growing up, my mother enjoyed including a bit of education in our family vacations. She read to us from many sources about our intended destination, preparing us to be observant and appreciative. As a young girl, I read aloud – at her prompting – from guidebooks, tourist bureau brochures, and travel magazines. These days, my mother still e-mails me travel information from many websites, though reading aloud is now optional. Mom’s creative approach to vacation planning sought out off-the-beaten-path sights where we had a better chance of learning something. This early preparation also required us to think through the items we needed to pack to make our agenda attainable, from extra layers of clothing to special equipment.

She purposefully overloaded every day’s schedule, grouping our options for geographic areas of the destination. With three kids, she knew to expect the unexpected and that you can’t always plan for it, so instead she planned to accommodate the necessary flexibility. Sometimes the need for flexibility arose from external sources, so we always packed a map that we had studied in advance and could reference quickly on site. Likewise, we had already reviewed our transportation options so that we were familiar with the available means and routes to allow for quick on-the-spot adjustments. She raised me to embrace these interruptions, saying “sometimes the times you get lost are when you make the best discoveries.”

We joined docent-led architectural walks in Chicago, climbed the Mayan ruins in Costa Maya (Mexico), attended off-Broadway plays in New York City, attempted our limited French at the Quebec World Music Festival, and learned to play the washboard with spoons in New Orleans, though Washington DC was the mother-load of educational sight-seeing. All along the way, mom encouraged us to ask questions and to explore as we toured, capturing what we experienced and what we drew out of that in our daily journaling.

With this personal history, I found the idea of a testing vacation very natural when I participated in Weekend Testing Americas two weeks ago. In my daily work, I am familiar with exploratory testing as a chartered but loosely structured activity. I start with a time box and a list of test ideas to guide my testing in the direction of acceptance criteria for a story, but I never script steps of a test case. However, WTA presented us with this mission, should we choose to accept it:

We want to explore this application and find as many short abbreviated charters as possible.
You have 30 minutes to come up with as many “testing vacations” as you can consider. The goal is that no single vacation should take more than five minutes. Shorter is better.

I paired with Linda Rehme and we tested Google Translate in these ways:

testing in Firefox 8 and Chrome

prompt to use new feature of reordering text in the result

selecting alternate translations of phrases in the result

manually editing translations of phrases (or alternate translates) of the result

moving result text with capitalization

moving result text with punctuation

couldn’t reorder words within a phrase of the result text

re-translate to revert to the original result text

Listen to both source and result text

manually editing text of the result to include words in another language and then Listen

Listen didn’t work for both of us

icons for Listen and Virtual Keyboard displayed in Firefox 8 but not Chrome

different drag hardware controls (laptop touchpad, laptop nub)

virtual keyboard for German (Deutsch)

moving virtual keyboard around in the browser

switching virtual keyboard between Deutsch and

misspelling words

prompted to use suggested spelling

prompted to select detected source language

Turn on/off instant translation

translating a single word with instant turned off displaying a list of results

When time was up, our moderators prompted us, “First, describe your “vacation”. Then describe what you saw while you were on vacation. And finally, what you wished you had done while you were on vacation (because really, there’s never enough time to do everything).”

My pair of testers noticed that different browsers displayed different controls, features worked in some browsers and not in others (e.g. Listen), result phrases could be manipulated as a unit but couldn’t be broken apart, and moving result phrases around did not correct either the capitalization or punctuation. I really wanted to go down the rabbit hole of having instant translation turned off because I immediately saw that result text didn’t clear and then clicking the translate button for a single word produced a different format of results (i.e. list of options below the result text). In fact, I found myself full of other testing vacation ideas and it was hard to keep track of them as I went along, testing rapidly. The best I could do was jot them down as I went while typing up descriptions of the testing we had completed. I enjoyed the rapid pace of the testing vacation exercise with its familiar exploratory testing style.

Weekend Testers Americas: Claire, the idea when you find that you are doing too many things is to step back and try to do just one. It’s like touring the Louvre. You can’t take it all in in one sitting. (Well, you can, but it would be severe information overload. 🙂 Claire Moss: I liked that this accommodated my “ooh shiny!” impulses, so don’t get me wrong. Weekend Testers Americas: Yes, testing vacations and “Ooh, shiny!” go *very well together 😀

Fortunately, my mom was always up for indulging those “Ooh, shiny!” impulses on vacations as I was growing up and now I have a new way to enjoy my testing time at work: testing vacations.

[I took the liberty of correcting spelling and formatting of text from the WTA #22 session.]